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The Day of the Locust

Synopsis

It happenend in Hollywood. But it could have happened in hell.

Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a new arrival to Los Angeles and aspiring art director, is trying to make it in Hollywood in the late 1930's. He soon finds himself increasingly infatuated with his mysterious neighbor, Faye (Karen Black), a wanna-be starlet with possibly devious motives of her own. As Tod is drawn deeper into the lurid private lives of studio bosses and film industry people, he gradually becomes desperate to know if Faye - or anyone - in Hollywood is capable of real love.

You would have to be full of ostentatious lunacy to dare to make such a film of grotesque beauty as this. Hollywood as the little shop of horrors has never looked so right and so very very acidic.

It's been a week since I saw this, and that also involved seeing it piece by piece over 4-5 days, so my recollection is a little hazy. Therefore, I'll keep this short and sweet.

Firstly, Locust is a particularly gay film, even by Schlesinger standards. From the sleazy yet enticing decadence of tinseltown seduction, full of mindless clawing hope and regurgitated, failed dreams, to the way all the characters orbit deliriously around Karen Black's conceptually brilliant and seductive aspiring starlet, to the…

Overlong and heavy-handed. I'm torn about this film, on the one hand it focuses in on one of the most interesting periods in Hollywood history, full of sleaze and intrigue and scandal, but on the other hand it uses really over-the-top metaphors that make sure any subtlety is bludgeoned out of the film. It's Lynch Lite, but at least it's impossible to be ambivalent about Lynch's work (Lynch is much better at using imagery to his full advantage). This was just one big shoulder shrug. Moral bankrupcy? Meh.

I've read multiple reviews now saying the film "builds tension", but I'm beginning to think that is shorthand for, "the film starts off okay, then drags on for an hour or more and then has one killer last scene", because there was little tension to speak of, I thought.

Karen Black is fantastic as ditzy wannabe starlet, Faye Greener, a perfect embodiment of the deceptive, ungraspable and ultimately toxic allure of Hollywood aspiration. William Atherton (Tod) and Donald Sutherland (Homer) are great as just two of the constellation of doomed and desperate men who orbit around Faye's flickering star.

Tod's increasingly eerie art department drawings for a Waterloo themed studio production grow ever more abstract and nightmarish, as the morally bankrupt nature of the movie business fully reveals itself to him. This eventually results in his vivid grotesqueries spilling off of the page and onto the streets during the films staggering conclusion.

I once caught only the truly disturbing finale on television when I was younger and vowed to…

John Schlesinger impressed me with Midnight Cowboy. Now he proves his excellence again with The Day of the Locust, which is both disgusting and poetic. A love story without a plot. A character study where no one is all that likable. Yet its thoroughly entertaining.

My favorite thing about Locust was how it allowed itself to be ridiculous. I love absurd humor, yelling for no reason, overdressed characters. Basically Karen Black's Faye Greener. She is painted up like a porcelain doll and seemingly incapable of maintaining a relationship. She sleeps with men as fast as others change clothes. The first man we witness most intensely is Tod Hackett, who is played sympathetically by William Atherton. He is an up and…

Somewhere between Nicolas Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE and Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ lies John Schlesinger's THE DAY OF THE LOCUST.

A scathing critique of Hollywood, with surrealist elements that amplify the grotesqueness of the system.

The plot revolves around an art director who is pursuing a wannabe starlet. The would-be actress flirts her way around town, but in all the wrong circles. Her father is a vaudeville performer that has lost his mind, so she takes up with a psychotic hermit with a religious bent.

I'd like to tell you what the Day of the Locust is about, but that would take quite awhile since it doesn't follow a traditional narrative structure. Instead the film appears to be a series of scenes mashed together in order to give the viewer a look at the seedy underbelly of 1930s Hollywood. The film mostly centers around a woman who is one of the most annoying and obnoxious characters ever captured on celluloid. Somehow, despite being mentally unhinged and ridiculously manipulative, most of the males in the film are drooling all over her. The males include an art director who tries to rape her, a sexually-repressed accountant who is almost as charming as a block of wood, and…

Somewhere between Nicolas Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE and Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ lies John Schlesinger's THE DAY OF THE LOCUST.

A scathing critique of Hollywood, with surrealist elements that amplify the grotesqueness of the system.

The plot revolves around an art director who is pursuing a wannabe starlet. The would-be actress flirts her way around town, but in all the wrong circles. Her father is a vaudeville performer that has lost his mind, so she takes up with a psychotic hermit with a religious bent.

Most of the exposition in this movie was kind of boring, but once you get past that this movie pisses you off, confuses you, and makes you want to scream at your screen. This movie is a representation of Hollywood in the 1930's, but is very relatable to how we view Hollywood and celebrities along with how we function as humans.

The ending is a quite brutal and crude take down of the Hollywood myth machine. Unfortunately the first and second acts are not that great and become very tedious. This film needed to be about 30 minutes longer for it to work and more scenes with Homer Simpson would have been nice.

How does one even review or rate a movie like this? Day of the Locust is one of the most compelling sloppy messes. It's compelling and hypnotic and pissed off and obvious and overlong and underbaked, not to mention Karen Black is men's fears incarnate, as an object of all the trashy elements of a woman whose abuse is practically shown to be deserved for all the abuse she heaps on everybody else.

Talk about a grotesquery.

Yet...it's still gonna stick in my mind for its visuals and its hilariously overwrought metaphors. The movie is nuts.